Fair Ball: How Minor League Baseball Players and Activists Launched an Unlikely Labor Movement and Can Inspire Future Change

Abstract

Throughout the many decades-long history of Minor League Baseball (MiLB), the developmental branch of Major League Baseball (MLB), players faced exploitative, grueling conditions. Specifically, most minor leaguers made just a few hundred dollars per week as recently as 2020 and were only paid during the five-month regular season (despite working year-round), meaning annual salaries ranged from as little as $6,000 to $11,000. Players also had to find and pay for their own housing, despite frequently being forced to relocate, constantly traveled across the country via overnight bus rides, received very few days off during the regular season, and were provided with inadequate meals at stadiums. Unlike major league players, who are represented by the Major League Baseball Players Association, minor leaguers did not belong to a union, enabling team owners to maximize their profits by cutting MiLB expenses wherever possible. However, shortly after the 2020 MiLB season was canceled due to the outbreak of COVID-19, a group of current and former minor league players and labor activists formed an advocacy organized called Advocates for Minor Leaguers (AfML) that quickly pressured owners into improving labor standards in the minor leagues by raising awareness and generating support for players on social media. In 2022, AfML coordinated a unionization effort that resulted in minor leaguers joining the MLBPA as a separate bargaining unit from major leaguers. As this thesis was being completed, the MLBPA and MLB reached the first-ever collective bargaining agreement involving MiLB players, which, among other benefits for players, significantly increased salaries. In this thesis, I first detail the abusive conditions minor league ballplayers used to face and explore the long history of labor relations in professional baseball that resulted in MiLB players being treated so poorly. I also offer broader historical context by placing the recent developments in MiLB within the general history of the labor movement in the United States, including the resurgence of labor activism since the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, I analyze how exactly AfML induced change and overcame several barriers to launch a successful unionization movement, primarily drawing on social media posts and real-time journalistic reports. Finally, I conclude by drawing implications for organized labor going forward and making connections between this movement and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a group of Florida Farmworkers who developed a revolutionary model for organizing, to make recommendations for the MLBPA going forward.